When Dan was 15 his brother died from a brain Tumor and he always told me that as his brother lay dying slowly he’d pray by his bedside so that God would not take his brother. He told me his brother woke up once and said in his Wigan drawl,
“keep the praying down will ye?”.
The morning before Dan had got married to his wife he'd taken me to his brothers grave, blue plastic bag wrapped tightly around 3 cans and a fist. We drank two, the third was for his brother, pored slowly over his grave with scant words, and off we marched before the emotion.
Although Dan had the casing of an average northern working class Wiganer, inside was the mind of a genius who I loved more than I can possibly describe. He always called me his brother and I would say the same of him, but in the final year I’d lost him. I put up a lot of money to try and get him to go to a rehab clinic, but he always refused for some reason out of fear that the neighbours would find out. Eventually when the end came in the form of a phone call, regret was the first thing that came to mind.
Could I have done more?
I remember once driving from Manchester to Liverpool on my way to source a short documentary and thinking, ‘I could go to see Dan or I could do this documentary’. I chose to go and see Dan. I remember going into his house, always the door open, and seeing Dan sat at the table with his back to me because he felt ashamed. And I walked up and just put my arms around him and he burst into tears.
Regret is a terrible thing.
I regretted the thought I had when I knew the end that would happen a year in advance. ‘Maybe I could document Dan in this terrible time’? But I chose life over the recording of it.
Sounds a bit fucked right? In some ways yes, but in reality it was a privilege to have Known Dan regardless of how it ended. My conversations with him, some just musings others more specific about how he thought Caravaggio was a genius and Rothco a madman, or that the Who are still the greatest band, will never leave me and always aided me, made me in fact.
Where’s that a positive all American ending, well hold your paint brushes, I’m not done yet.
When I finally reconciled that Dan was gone I started to ring our old friends from art college, I even at one point tried to ring him to ask him what some of their numbers were. Shit technology, it has no feelings I thought, looking at his number that has no answer.
Before the funeral I went to see him in an open casket and sat with him talking to myself and crying. I stroked his head and even took photographs of him. I mean, I didn’t prop him in the corner of the room with a can of cider and a packet of Space raider crisps, which he probably would have wanted, they were just images to help me conceive this.
At the funeral hundreds of people turned up, our old college friends, his work mates from the post office and of course his drinking buddies. The Vicar freaked out with his wino nose and bumbling sermons that Dan would always laugh at. The vicar even said, “Dan was a generous man who gave to a cancer charity”, and I nearly burst into fits of laughter remembering Dans’ Derek & Clive impersonations.
Though this wasn’t the end of Dan to me, even when the coffin started to descend into the grave on top of his brother. Fuck, was this the absolute end, the cold blackness, the nothing? I wanted to pull the coffin out and drive off with it, ‘you fucker God, he suffered enough’, I thought. But you have to let him go. Go back into the Earth; let it absorb his pain and his personality that filled that body. In that final moment I turned to his father who, without tears, just looked at me, nodded, and turned away. Dans body was now gone.
Yet, to me, there is no end to Dan, no finality. I think a person you love always stays with you even when they are gone and you pass this crosspollination on to other people you meet without even knowing it. On that rainy day of Dans’ funeral I re-established old friendships that shared a common love of Dan and that lives on today.
To end, Dan always quoted Francis Bacon, who said,
“Life is only distraction from death”.
To which I’d always say in return,
“Yeah, but with you around what a bloody distraction it is”!
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